Hello all!
Flags have been asked for since about the week the game came out and every time I looked at it I put it off. Because "just add flags" is never just adding flags. The scenario data had to change but today I finally got around to it.
A poll on Discord finally decided the shape of it. Most of you did not want flags sitting in a menu somewhere, you wanted them on the front line, standing with the troops. So that is where I started and everything else grew out of it.
Flags
On the map and in the panels
Countries fly their flags now. The country panel, the rankings, the ledger, the war pacts and the end of game report all show you whose something is before you read a single word.
The front line wears them too. The infantry holding each side of a war are marked with their own country's flag instead of a plain dot.
Every country in the 2025 scenario has one.
Make your own
Any country in your scenario can have a flag and there are three ways to give it one.
Pick a built-in one: 173 of them, searchable.
Use your own image: drop a PNG in your flags folder and it shows up in the picker. 96 x 72 is the size the game uses, but anything works, it gets scaled to fit rather than stretched.
Build one in the game: start from a background color and a pattern, then add up to three icons from a library of over 4000, searchable by name.
The designer lets you drag an icon around on the flag to place it, drag its corner to resize it and its top handle to turn it. It previews at full size and at the size a flag actually appears in a list, side by side, because a design that looks great on a big preview can turn to mush on a ranking row and it is better to find that out before you publish. You can export what you make as a PNG to reuse or share.
Panels
Move them where you want them
Another Discord request and a good one. The country panel, the war rankings, the pact rankings and the new nation panel can all be dragged by their title bar and they stay where you put them in the session.
War rankings and pact rankings used to be the same panel wearing two hats, so opening one closed the other. They are separate panels now and you can keep both up at once.
Scenario Editor
New country colors: a new country now starts with a color of its own, picked to sit as far away as possible from the countries already on the map. No more recoloring every single one by hand.
Other
Strength numbers along a front are outlined now as well, so they stay readable when the line gets crowded.
Fixes
Workshop updates: uploading a scenario you downloaded from the Workshop now updates your own item instead of quietly creating a second copy of it. If you have items published before this update, re-upload them once and they will behave from then on. (hopefully)
Pausing: pressing Space no longer changes the map mode or opens a menu at the same time. I don't know how bad this bug was but I fixed it.
Color picker: it was reading upside down. Picking near the top or the bottom of the square gave you roughly the opposite brightness to the one you were looking at.
Alliance names: they no longer appear over the map outside the alliance view until you move the camera.
Country names: a batch of misspellings in the 2025 world are fixed. Bahrain, Costa Rica, Djibouti, Eswatini, Guinea-Bissau, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Luxembourg, Mauritania, the Philippines and Tajikistan.
Known Issues
AI Studio: the frontline rendering bug on subsequent runs is still open. It is next on my list.
As always, thank you for the feedback and for playing. The flags on the front came straight from a poll, so keep telling me what you want to see.